About Me

I've had one foot in the past ever since I was a kid. One of these days I'll be history, myself, but meanwhile I'll stop here to make some notes about things that interest me and maybe you. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to find my books.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

I am beginning to think that's why only 8 DNA markers came out of Egypt--because it is too hard to get any popaffiliation without 9! The program used here gives you slightly different stats each time you submit the person's STRs, but the difference is never significant. The per centages are not admixture proportions but just probabilities. Here's the predicted PA of Yuya.

As people have long suspected, Yuya has a good chance of being of foreign extraction and may have even registed a higher Asiatic ratio had I not been forced to give him the high modern Egyptian 12/14 numbers at D8S1179 by default--just to get the necessary 9th locus for the program. I don't know what to think when the "probability" for Eurasian is about as great as sub-Saharan! I used the Egyptian numbers because I did not know what other population to take them from. They come from the DNA of 140 unrelated people of Cairo, a northern city with a mixed population. This may screw up the results, but to what degree I do not know. In fact, I added the same locus to all the STRs of the royals, but had to give it in different combinations of 14 and 12. Next is Thuya and, again, according to this program, scholars seem to have been correct. She seems not to have been foreign but an African type. You have to click on the images to read them. The incredible thing is that, at D7S820, Thuya has an allele that doesn't show up again in the family until the larger foetus from the tomb of Tutankhamun. It is 13 and doesn't show up much in Egypt, being the lowest one at that locus. Where does it do best? By far the best in Bari, Italy, that ancient Greek settlement, the same place a rare allele of the mother of Ramesses III [at a different locus] does best. What gives?

Next is their daughter, Queen Tiye.

Her husband, Amenhotep III, seems overwhelmingly sub-Saharan:

Up next is the KV55 Individual, the son of the king and queen, who is predicted as possibly Asiatic!

His sister, the Younger Lady, on the other hand does not have so much Asiatic probability.

TUT

Yet when I assigned Tutankhamun a double 14 at D8S1179[highest Egyptian number at that locus], his sub-Saharan probability ratio became lessened.

Do I know how accurate all this can be by adding a default marker and only having 9? No! As you can see, 34 values are preferred for each person and I was only able to provide 18, two of them being guesses. That is not enough, but the 18 can give a glimpse into the truth. The program is not biased toward sub-Saharan, as is evidenced by the assignments of Yuya, the patriarch of the clan. But it's hard to know what is really going on here. Just an experiment using what data there is.

Here is what came out when I put the DNA of Ramesses III and his son into a popaffiliator program. It requires 9 loci and I had only 8 to work with. Therefore in the case of Ramesses III, I added D3S1358, putting in the highest number for the modern Egyptian population, 15, for the father and the arbitrary high Greek one of 16 for the mother. I did this because, at D7S820, the mother of Ramesses III has 15, which is not even on the chart for modern Egyptians. Here is the result:

You'll have to click on the image to read it. Next comes "Unknown Man E". For his 9th locus, I added a different one, D851179. For his father, I put the highest number at that marker in the Egyptian population, which is 14. For the mother, I put in an only slightly lower one of 12. I added nothing foreign, that I know of, to the DNA of "Unknown Man E", yet his "Eurasian" quotient rises from that of Ramesses III. Caveat, I do not know how accurate this popaffiliator is.

It can be found here, if anyone wants to enter his own DNA to test it out.

Monday, December 24, 2012

I have been looking at the autosomal DNA of Ramesses III and "Unknown Man E". I got it from Zink's paper.

Tentatively, my guess is that the mother of Ramesses III had Greek blood. At the locus D7S820, she has the rare /15/, an allele which makes the best showing in Bari, Italy, [Barion] an ancient Greek settlement of Magna Græcia. The name of the mother of Ramesses III is Tiye Merenese, but that doesn't necessarily mean she came from the Egyptian populace. Greek ancestry could account for the light blond hair of "Unknown Man E". At CSF1PO, you can see that both men have 7/10. At that marker the 7 is very rare and many populations are lacking it completely. It seems to be an African number, but not a North African one. Very likely it is the common allele that make the two men father and son. The 10 is extremely common at the locus. It doesn't mean the mother and the grandmother were related. 10 does well in most populations and is absent from only a few, such as indigenous Mexico, although in Spain it shows quite well. 10 has a large showing in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and even among American Jewry. I think that the mother of "Unknown Man E" can have come from a Middle Eastern population, even the Egyptian. We'll soon see what others have to say. You can click on the graph to enlarge. I haven't had the chance to analyze most of the other loci yet.

Did Setnakht, the father of Ramesses III, have anything to do with Greeks? In 2003, I wrote a paper equating the "Proteios" of the Greek writers with the pharaoh Setnakht. This idea gained some acceptance and the paper can be read here: http://www.oocities.org/scribelist/setnakht.html

Proteios, king of Egypt, was said to have entertained Helen of Troy at his court. This theme became a drama by Euripides called "Helen". The son of Proteios fell in love with the Spartan beauty, but she, of course, left Egypt.